SD1700. Mary Brotherton to Frederick Tennyson

As published in The Brownings’ Correspondence, 20, 362 (in part).

16 Via S. Isidoro, Rome

December 13th, 1853

My dear Mr Tennyson,

This comes hoping to find you restored to your household gods; Mr and Mrs Browning seem to think you must be in Florence again by this time. We have just become acquainted with this couple, who are at least as agreable as they are celebrated. They kindly came to see us, without waiting to be called on,—or the pleasure, to us, of knowing them, might have been delayed, as I am under doctor’s orders a prisoner to the house, & Augusto is as you know, a very shy bird! He was afraid to face these literary lions till he found them so amiable– Little sweet serious earnest Mrs Browning is indeed a lioness that roars you gently as a sucking dove. Nothing can be more simple than she is. Any mannerism she may be guilty of is entirely spent on her poetry—she has not a grain of affectation left for herself!

She spoke of you with enthusiasm and warm regard—regretting that they had left Florence just too soon to see you first. We like Mr. Browning. …

The only fault I find with Mrs Browning is the want in her organization of any sense of the laughable. Am I right?

Publication: Letters to Frederick Tennyson, ed. Hugh J. Schonfield (London, 1930), pp.110–114.

Manuscript: Harvard University.

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